Microsoft accuses kids of bullying Santa into sex chat

Gigantic global software beast Microsoft has blamed two young girls for killing Santa.

Now that it has pulled the plug on its oral-sex-obsessive MSN bot, the firm's spinners have tried to deflect scrutiny of its sloppiness by claiming that the outrage was caused by users.

Our story of how Santa turned nasty has been picked up by the AP newswire. It means Microsoft's lies over the affair are set to appear in papers and on news channels all over the world.

Here's the whopper that Microsoft spokesman Adam Sohn told AP: "It's not like if you say, 'Hello Santa', he's going to throw inappropriate stuff at you."

Erm, yes it is, Adam. It's pretty much exactly like that. When we innocently asked him to eat something, Santa said: "It's fun to talk about oral sex, but I want to chat about something else."

The slapdash job Microsoft did on the supposedly festive chat agent was revealed when Reg reader Iain's nieces offered Santa some pizza. According to Microsoft the girls were "pushing this thing to make it do things it wasn't supposed to do".

Bleurgh. That's PR at its worst, and now we feel dirty. Would it really have hurt Microsoft's pride so much to admit the cockup?